And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.
RALPH ELLISONPower doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form…without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death…the truth is the light and light is the truth.
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Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
RALPH ELLISON